by Signe Pike
“Who ended you?” I asked. Casting about, I spotted an indication: a dark smear on the nearby trunk of a birch. I bent to touch it, lifting my fingers to my nose. The sharp stink made my eyes water.
Boar.
And a beast of one, to finish a wolf. I turned to the men and held up my fingers, showing them the scat. Their shoulders tensed in the fading light. We Britons were famed for our skill in boar hunting, and even we did not venture it without the help of our dogs. Boar could grow to the size of a small pony and spill a man’s guts with one toss of their head. I’d seen men thrown into tree trunks. Always it was a bloodletting.
My feet were midstream when Maelgwn gave the soft call that served as a warning. I looked up to see his gaze fixed over my shoulder.
I turned slowly, weapon at the ready. Forty paces downstream stood a bristled black boar, his hind leg stained dark with blood.
I had seen wild boar before. Something of this beast was different, almost otherworldly. Evil. There were gouges on his chest and foreshoulder from the wolf’s fangs. Breath fogged from his nostrils as he caught my scent on the breeze. In his eyes I saw the blackness of never-ending night.
So this is my end. Let him come for me.
He tossed his head, eyes piercing mine. And then he charged.
Maelgwn and the men splashed into the stream, shouting, “Yahhhh! Yahhhhhhh!” But I stood motionless, preferring to be speared in the front than in the back, fleeing without honor. And then something within me shifted. Broke open. Rage boiled up from deep within me, rage that had been seething untouched, rage that bellowed from my throat with a scream at the thundering black pig as I drew back my spear and, aiming between his eyes, thrust it with all of my might at the hurtling beast.
It was scarcely enough to knock him off course. The boar gave a snort as the spear glanced off the thick armor of his hide and I dove into the thick stand of brush. Thorns tore at my cloak as I scrambled to my feet to recover my fallen spear, flicking it back into my grip with the tip of my boot. The boar was already circling, rounding for another attack. Five men were as nothing to a beast enraged by the frenzy of survival.
“Stand apart!” Archer shouted, and we heeded him, becoming multiple targets as the boar plowed again, riverstone scattering in a spray beneath his hooves.
He charged Rhiwallon this time, tossing him like a child’s doll into the water, where he lay as if stunned.
“Get up, man, get up,” I shouted, and at the sound of my voice, the beast turned once more and bent his head like a shovel.
Enough. This would be the creature’s last charge. I could not witness any more death.
The collision felt as if a giant had flung me into the face of a boulder. My spear snapped in half, dropping from my grip, and a liquid-hot pain sliced across my legs as I was thrown to the side. I fell, grasping, my palm splitting open as I caught the hoof of his hind leg. Not enough to hold him, but enough to make him stumble. Fendwin shouted, and I saw the flash of his sword as the great boar twisted and swung back round to finish me, prone as I was upon the ground. We were a blur of movement, tumbling, scraping. A stab in my chest like a dagger and the crushing weight of the creature on top of me. With a roar I reached, clawing at the creature’s eyes, rolling and kicking as I clutched at him, striking and mauling with my fists. Then a streak of light exploded like the spark of a flint as my temple was struck, my head knocked to the side. The tip of my broken spear lay upon the streambed and I grasped for it. No sooner had I gripped it than I turned back to see tusks coming at my throat. Razor-sharp tips tore my arm as I sent my hand up, thrusting the spear deep into the tender joint where neck meets chin. Blood erupted in a fountain, blinding me beneath him.
The sound was rage, then agony. A piglet’s squeal.
I sank into the ground as the boar dropped lifeless on top of me, the weight of him sending the breath from my lungs in a gust of exhaustion. Of relief.
“Lailoken.” Fendwin’s voice came.
“Aye.” I blinked and smeared the blood from my eyes as he and the men hoisted the beast from on top of me and the carcass thudded onto the ground. Battle fury yet pulsed through my veins, dulling the worst of any pain, but as my heart worked to recapture its rhythm, I glanced over my wounds, gauging the destruction. My legs were most worrisome. Fendwin bent, and I offered up my tunic, which he gripped, ripping between two fists to fashion a binding to stanch the blood.
Nodding gratefully, I sat back on the rocks. A rank smell came from the boar. I looked at the beast, then at Fendwin. “You pierced his bladder.”
His eyes widened in disbelief. “Is this how you thank me for saving your life?”
“ ’Tis only he won’t be much good to us now. The meat’ll be spoilt.”
“Then you’d better do a swift job of cleaning it.” He yanked the binding around my wounds a bit too tightly. We warriors wore our wit like armor, but it still lay between us, that Rhys had died by his hand.
I looked at him. “You had no debt, Fendwin. And still it has been paid.”
I did not know if I could forget the sight of his dirk slitting my nephew open, but I could see how he suffered for it. “In any case, you needn’t have risked yourself. Mine was clearly the death-dealing blow.”
Fendwin stood. “Is this not my sword embedded in his brain?” He reached to reclaim it but stopped, his eyes on the water. I turned.
Rhiwallon lay half submerged, fair hair streaming in the water like a merrow’s, eyes open to the rushing burn.
No one spoke. I dropped my head into my hands. We were twilight men, then, and I know we all thought it: to survive the battle only to be felled by a pig. Death dined with a ferocity we thought we had known but did not truly comprehend.
Slowly, painfully, I stood with Fendwin’s aid as Archer and Maelgwn pulled Rhiwallon from the stream. I bent over him, reaching to touch his face, waxy from the icy water, easing his eyelids shut.
“Sleep, brother. And wake to claim your place at our ancestors’ table.”
Placing my hands over his heart, I spoke the death blessing. We could not build a blaze hot enough to make ashes of his body. The earth was too frozen to dig a grave, even had we the proper tools. In the end, two men carried his body deeper into the wood and laid him out. The wolves and the ravens would have their share after all.
“We must make camp,” Archer said. I could scarcely walk. Others had been injured, though less gravely. We would need to build a fire and tend our wounds.
In the end, the boar could have been salvaged, but the thought turned our stomachs. “He is a foul and wicked creature,” Archer said. “We dare not eat such meat.”
Yet I took the wolf’s pelt, then set aside a small cutting from the boar’s flesh. I had a mind how to use it.
Archer felled a doe just before dark and we cleaned her, eating round the fire in silence. Maelgwn and Fendwin had fashioned a shelter and we sat beneath it now, dry enough as night pressed in. Snow came. I watched the flakes fall, spitting into nothingness in the flames, and thought of Angharad and the stones. Of the beast and her warning.
It had come for me twice now. Each time I had set my mind to die, yet clawed like a wild man simply to live. Loathing turned my stomach, and I set down my meat. Arderydd might have been finished and the black pig dead, but something in me warned this beast would not be so easily vanquished. It would come again, though I did not know when.
We tended to each other’s wounds using what salves and ointments we’d brought in our healer’s pouch, then took turns sitting watch, staring into the darkness and banking up the fire to keep those who were slumbering warm. My watch came just before dawn. Beyond the flames, the burn rushed ever on. In the trickling of its water, I heard Rhys’s choking gurgle and the wild boar coughing its own blood. I thought of the Mad Keeper and his feathered cloak.
Light returned to the sky, and we fashioned a stretcher using Rhiwallon’s discarded cloak and tunic. The men carried me home as I clutched the deer meat to my chest
.
Back at the huts, we lit a fire to heat rocks for the fulacht fian on the streambed, dropping them into the rectangular stone pit until the water hissed and sang. I bundled herbs for healing, and we crawled beneath the skin-covered wicker frame to bathe and steam our wounds clean. But the ritual only served to awaken something unsettled, turning me restless and irritable.
Days passed. My body began to heal well enough that I could walk, though painfully. My wounds had not soured, yet my emptiness remained.
The next morning I gathered my things, fetching the wolf pelt and the strip of dried boar, and went to see Archer. Archer had said the Wisdom Keeper had gone mad. But there was a madness in me also. It stirred like an animal. If I did not leave, it would swallow me whole. I did not know what awaited me there. But the Keeper in his cloak of feathers had come in a dream. I knew I must meet him. I could no longer ignore my summons from the dead.
“I would go to the temple at the waterfall,” I said.
Archer looked at me as if I’d gone mad already. “It is forbidden.”
“Forbidden for the Selgovae, perhaps. But not so for me.”
He shook his head. “As I told you, it is cursed.”
“And what if I, too, am cursed?”
“If you truly think it, then why go to such a place, Lailoken?”
I hesitated, uncertain whether I should tell him. But I was a guest in his lands. “I would travel there to undergo the Bull’s Sleep,” I said. Archer studied me a long moment from his antler-backed chair.
There are times a Wisdom Keeper must seek solace, Cathan once told me. When nightmares will not leave. When anger or violence become master. When he can no longer tell the living from the dead.
The Bull’s Sleep was a ritual kept for diviners. Men such as Diarmid would use it to See. A bull was slaughtered, its hide and a morsel of meat kept aside. The Keeper was wrapped in the skin of the beast, meat in his mouth, blindfolded and bound, left to pursue the animal as it raced into the Otherworld.
“I suppose you have considered the obvious,” Old Man Archer said.
“Which is?”
“You wish to undergo the Bull’s Sleep, and yet you have no bull,” Archer said.
“I wasn’t aware you might spare one,” I said, and Archer gave a small smile of amusement. “I have the skin of the wolf and the meat of the boar. You saw the beast, Archer. There was something more to it. I am an augur, not a diviner, but I cannot silence this urging.”
Archer’s point was sound. I did not know if the rite could even be worked with animals such as these, nor so long after death. But somehow I knew Archer would understand.
“So be it,” he said. And nodding to his men, Archer readied to take me into the wild.
My legs made for slow moving. Archer moved ahead, kicking footholds in the snow. The wind whipped, biting.
We walked a good ways, then crested a hill. Dropping down the far side, we disappeared once more into the Caledonian Deep.
CHAPTER 20
Languoreth
Tutgual’s Hall
Partick
Kingdom of Strathclyde
1st of November, AD 573
I sheared away Eira’s brown locks. When it was done, I stood behind her with cedar oil and a comb, pulling the nits from her hair as Eira told me her story.
“I was born to Urien of Rheged,” she began, “raised beside the salt waters of the Solway Firth. But my mother went on to bear four other children to my father. And though I tried to make myself useful, when I was but a girl, I was sent to be fostered under the care of my aunt, Urien’s sister. Euerdil is her name.”
“The mother of Gwrgi and Peredur,” I said. At the mention of their names, Eira startled beneath my hands. Something dreadful had befallen her. “I am sorry,” I said. “You needn’t tell me anything that pains you.”
“No, no. I must,” Eira said. “It is important you know all.” She took a breath. “I was bright, you see, and my aunt prone to melancholy. My father sought to soothe his sister in sending her some light. Or so he said. I soon learned the truth of it—a powerful king does nothing out of kindness alone. When my aunt’s husband, Eliffer, had died, Gwrgi and Peredur were chosen to rule—Gwrgi in the north, Peredur in the south. Now the Angles of Bernicia were testing their hold on the land. Ebrauc is all that stands between Bernicia and Rheged. Euerdil was no longer queen. But if I were wedded to a lord of Ebrauc, and if I should bear him a son, my father and brothers would hold influence over Ebrauc again.
“I believe they meant to take the land. And so away I was sent. My brothers wept the day I left. However, my aunt made me most welcome, and my seasons in Ebrauc seemed as if charmed. Of course, I missed my family. But my aunt was kind and glad for company. I thought myself fortunate it was only my aunt and me, along with her servants. She gifted me beautiful dresses and all manner of things. But then autumn came, and the raiding season was over. Her sons came home.”
I paused in my work. Already I felt sickened.
“My aunt knew of her son’s wickedness. Perhaps she thought me too old. But my aunt was a fool,” she said quietly. “Gwrgi left me for dead. ‘Throw her in the river,’ he told his man, for he could not be bothered to do it himself. And his man would have done, had I not woken up. I woke as my body hit the cold water, and I screamed. I begged. I suppose he could have drowned me. Perhaps he thought I did not stand much chance of surviving in any case. He brought me instead to a woman who lived at the edge of the forest. It was the place the people of Ebrauc brought their dying and their dead—an unlucky place, one Gwrgi did not care to visit.
“And I did not die. I decided to live.”
I set down the cedar oil and sat, for I could not continue.
“The woman treated my wounds and concealed me whilst I healed. She taught me to darken my golden hair so I mightn’t be found. I soon discovered my aunt had sent word to my family that I had died from fever. Winter came. The woman told me I must find a new name—that I must never speak of Gwendolen again. I chose Eira, after the snow.”
“But could you not have returned to your father?” I asked. “Surely he would have made things right. Surely he would have punished Gwrgi for what he had done.”
“Return to the man who had sent me to hell?”
“I am sorry,” I said. “ ’Tis only I have heard Urien of Rheged is an honorable man…”
“Yes, my father would have brought war upon Ebrauc and slit Gwrgi’s throat. But I was at least my own master. Daughters must be wed for their father’s gain.” She looked up, meeting my gaze. “Perhaps this is something you understand.”
Her words struck. Eira would rather live in poverty and obscurity than be another man’s property. I’d had a similar choice—there was a time I could have fled with Maelgwn, but what was a life lived in exile, in hiding? I’d told myself I was wedding Rhydderch to protect the way of life for my people, yet all this time had passed. And what had I done? My cheeks reddened.
“You inspire me,” I said. “Yours was not an easy choice.”
“The woman, Hila, she loved me.” Eira smiled. “Love makes all things easier. She decided to raise me as her own. But we could not stay in Ebrauc. We traveled south, to her sister in Elmet. There we built a small hut with the help of her sister’s family. Hila was a woods witch who traded her remedies for food. I learned to hunt and do many things a gentle daughter of Rheged would not so that we might survive. But Hila was aging, and her sister—whom I then called an aunt—had too many mouths to feed. I could not earn my barters as Hila once did; I did not have the healer’s touch. My uncle knew a warrior at Gwenddolau’s fort. They had been boys together. Rhiwallon passed me off as a servant, bringing me to serve in the kitchens at Caer Gwenddolau. That is how I came to meet your brother.”
“And Lailoken, he knew the truth?”
“Yes. After a while. Lailoken and Rhiwallon alone.” Then she stopped and looked up, reaching for my hands. “You must know how very much I love your daughte
r, Languoreth.”
My breath caught. It was this I had been starving for, but Eira had been so mistreated, how could I have pressed her? Now I took her hands in mine. “Please,” I said. “Tell me all that you know.”
And so Eira told me the story of the battle and Angharad’s escape from the cliffs, how my brave little girl had found Eira at their hut in the wood. How they fled, together, until they were discovered by Gwrgi and his men.
Rage seethed inside me. For a moment I felt my body could not contain it, that it would drive me raving. “Tell me he did not harm her.”
Eira fell quiet, looking down at her hands. “I told her to run. She never would have gone had she known I intended to stay behind. I promised I would follow, though I knew there was little hope of my own escape. They did not find her.”
Eira’s eyes filled with the nightmare of all that had come after. I expelled a shaky breath. No words could speak to her sacrifice. I sat, feeling helpless.
“How can I ever repay what you have done?” I asked.
Eira looked up. “You took me from the carts.”
“Oh, sweet gods.” I dropped my head into my hands. It sat between us, the horror she’d been through. We said nothing for a while. Then I risked the question I knew was most important to her. “Did Gwrgi… know you?”
She closed her eyes a moment. “He said he had no taste for mutton.”
His warriors, then. I felt sickened all over again. “They traded you off when they met with Tutgual and his men. Is that how you came to be in our prison carts?”
Eira nodded. I stood, pacing out my anger, my helplessness, my resentment of men.
We still had no news of my brother or Maelgwn. Angharad was lost and utterly alone in a wasteland of her father’s making. But now I had some idea of where to send scouts. And at Cadzow I’d be nearer to Gwenddolau’s lands, if only by a day.